Raymond Scott is one of the more fascinating figures in 20th century music. He's so fresh that I blogged him in 2001:

As soon as I can find a copy, I plan to enthusiastically purchase Raymond Scott's Manhattan Research Boxset. Scott is best known for creating the zany jazz music in the 1930s that Carl Stalling eventually assimilated into the soundtrack for early Bugs-and-Daffy cartoons. I originally discovered him when a cover-band opened for They Might Be Giants, and was thrilled to have found, after literally years of (admittedly not-particularly-painstaking) searching, the author of 'Powerhouse'.

As if that wasn't cool enough: When jazz orchestras went out of style, Scott turned his attention to electronic synthesizers. He worked closely with awesome folks like Robert Moog and Jean-Jacques Perry, and pioneered some of the first electric noise generators, including (of particular interest to me) early implementations of algorithmic music composition. Eventually, he formed Manhattan Research Incorporated, which used synthesizers to create bizzare 1950s commercial jingles. The fruits of MRI-- comercials, demos, and other weird errata-- were released this year on a two-CD set, and they are astounding.

Did he anticipate contemporary ambient downtempo electronic music by half a century? Yes he did. Did he attempt to acoustically map the inside of Jim Henson's head? Yes he did.

ANYWAY, to bring things back to the present, the afforementioned boxset includes "Lightworks!", this shiny electro-mambo lauding the fun of of a new boardgame from The Tomorrow People At Bendix. It's bright and whimsical and maybe naive. Look!, it shouts, We have discovered The Synthesizer! And no, it need not be scary and cold electronic-- it can be whimsical and fun and silly! Be not afraid of technology, thou humbled and generical 1950s middle-class citizens!

Then welcome to 2006, JayDee's Donuts album flips Lightworks on its face. The whimsicality is tweaked into this menacing blunted breakbeat quirkiness, all sirens and chirping and shouting and banging. Dilla's uniquely nonsyncopated precision-mixed percussion makes Scott step lively.

This whole album is heartbreaking-- no track is longer than two minutes, but each has the seed of a killer four-minute hiphop gem from 2010. So I dunno, maybe the Raymond is secondary. Kweli says:

Recently on the Block Party Tour, Erykah talked about making Didnt Cha Know. As her keyboard player played the song she talked about being in the basement with Dilla in the D. He said pick a record, any record. She closes her eyes, grabs the one her hand leads her too. He said drop the needle, anywhere. She drops it, and the bass player plays the bassline that would come to be Didn't Cha Know. She says it's the most amazing thing she ever heard. Jay said gimme 10 minutes. That's classic...

So what I'm saying is the guy could flip a gimmicky 50s synth jingle or a random cheesey upright bass into equally classic and devastating tracks. And finding Scott on the album was like finding my mad-scientist grandfather at Wonderland on a Friday freaking out to Cee-Lo.

Raymond Scott: Lightworks - Download the Track / Buy the album

J-Dilla: Lightworks - Download the Track / Buy the album

Currently in heavy rotation:

"...Music isn't really like cooking--there's no reason why you can't have artists who make a whole dish out of the sonic equivalent of flour, or salt. (And you do--virtuosos of monochromatic concentration like Plastikman and Pole). And yet there's hardly any positive terms in pop critical discourse for fanatical focus or fixated perseverance... Look at dance magazines, and you will see reviews that approvingly list an artist's forays into genres other than the one whose section they are actually reviewed under. Stylistic inconstancy, generic treason, and dilettantism are, paradoxically, almost supreme values..."

~Simon Reynolds, 2001

Shows coming soon to DC: The Roots (with Chuck Brown!), Procedure (now at Science Club), and (wait for it...) Jason Forrest AND Food For Animals.

Daaaaaaamm. And you thought the district was all indyrock.

MP3ing: This guy Malcom Kipe on Merck has an album out of really nice simple instrumental hiphop and sample-monkeying. Nothing crazy or revolutionary, but that's probably why I'm playing it a lot.

Thoughting: The new bubble is here, kids. Last week at SXSWi the number of VC-fueled $5000 open-bars was out of control. Now 37 Signals is on the cover of Business Week for supposedly bringing KISS-style opensource dogma to the masses. I spend a lot of time lately alternating between excitement and ambivalence about all this.

Coding: The new freelance career is busy! Event-organizing tools for the World Food Programme, site redesigns for Ashoka, and miscellaneous work on a half dozen smaller projects.

Designing: I dislike having Toneland as a "personal blog" and tjones.cc as a "professional site". I've been experimenting with ways to merge them. My latest attempt is a moo.fx/flickr/del.icio.us hybrid that I'm not really happy with yet.

Listening: to Bruce Sterling's SXSWi keynote, in which he basically tells everyone there that they are obese and backwards. Not that I necessarily disagree with him. I'm trying to decide if it's all hand-waving or actually substantive. I'm also processing how a lot of people seem to be making a living as conference-track wide-eyed motivational-speakers-slash-public-intellectuals.

Jay Dilla the beat killa died today. He was 32.

Cannot overstate this man's musical influence on the sound of hip-hop today, and on my personal music listening and production. Stones Throw has the complete discog, and it's huge. There are just not more than a few producers in the same league- Pete Rock, Premier, Prince Paul, RZA... Anyone else?

The man broke into my consciousness in 96 doing the production on The Pharcyde's Runnin, De La Soul's The Stakes is High, and the bulk of A Tribe Called Quest's Beats Rhymes and Life. Am I missing any, or is that is literally all the best hiphop albums from 1996 that weren't The Roots or DJ Shadow?

Then over the next ten years just consistently dropped stunningly good beats all the time. Highlites for me: Runnin, Stakes, ATCQ's The Jam and Start It Up, The Roots' Dynamite, Q-Tip Breathe And Stop and Ride, all of Welcome 2 Detroit, Four Tet's As Serious As Your Life remix, and finally Questlove's freaking-out-excited rants about JD circa 1999. There's more, I know there's more, but that's all I got for now.

I commemorate him with this appropo-seeming clip of Clyde Stubblefield drumming with James Brown in 1968. Keep the funk alive?

After a four month outage due to blog depression and bread slicing, The Department of Toneland Security is back in commission. Thank you for your patience.

To start 2006 off right, this is a half-hour mash-up of some much-loved tracks from 2005: New_Year_Resolution.mp3

I almost missed this, since KK posted it while I was in Italy with limited internet access. But, here is Music Dork Meme, via KK and Wayne.

total volume of music files on my computer: Like Wayne and KK, about 20GB. This is down from about 23 yesterday before I had to clear some off to make room for the latest gargantuan World Of Warcraft patch. If you count miscellaneous noncompressed audio for composition, that's another 4GB on my laptop and 10 or so on my outboard drive.

last CD i bought was: Scavengers by Food For Animals. After listening to astounding MP3s of Elephants and Cut And Paste for months and months, I finally broke down and bought the album. It's part of an effort I've been making recently (partially inspired by recent conversations with Ian MacKaye and Chuck Brown) to find really good DC-native musicians. AoW are mindblowingly new and innovative and noisey and good.

song playing right now: Bonobo's Recurring from the new Live Sessions EP on Ninja. Which I've only had for a few days since Bleeping it, but is seriously growing on me-- I was listening the tricky midtempo percussion and delicate pizzicato strings and complicated swooning harmonies and suddenly found it to be intensely conected with that archetypal grandaddy of delicatronica, the RDJ Album, which now has me real excited to hear where B's future output is going to go...

five songs i listen to a lot these days: Excepting the afforementioned. All 5 are seriously impacted by recent balmy and spaced-out weather conditions.

1. David Last- Cat-Silver. This track is just gorgeous and nice.

2. Four Tet- High Fives. Not really Tet's best track, but I'm a sucker for the plinky xylophone beeps and swirly faux-turntable sounds. Also of course the recent Madvillain remixes have been in heavy rotation.

3. Nightmares on Wax- Argha Noah. In line with the K&D track I posted a few weeks ago, late-90s open-aired synth-heavy shimmery-guitar tracks like this one have been getting a lot of listening time from me lately.

4. Edan- Making Planets. But really the whole freaking album is brilliant. Seriously throwback/retro while still experimental and forward-looking and creepy and so on.

5. Cellophane- Music Colours. Since its post on gabba a while back, I have played this hella cheesey italodisco so much that I am really sick of it. Really. Colours!

Here is some great stuff recently found on the internets.

Adoru has a great video of Ahmir Thompson babbling about his awesome record collection.

Noz at Cocaineblunts just posted some killer Ghostface bootlegs, with the striking assertion that "in the utopian future where sample clearance laws are lifted, the ten disc ghostface lost tapes box set will be a must." Dizzamn.

The Agriculture has, in addition to a totally enchanting scrolly slideshow of crazy party people mugging for the camera, full-length MP3s from most of their releases. Check out especially, of course, David Last.

This track by Gavouna is also really good, I am resolved to pick up the album.

Much props to O-Dub, who has kept Soul-Sides going as one of the best mp3blogs around. Favored recent picks include: On how the LA riots changed hiphop, On the long twisted and fascinating history of the Apache break, and Boogaloo podcasts Part One and Two.

My new favorite non-music blog is The Rude Pundit.

Finally, June being the spacey month it is, KK and I have become re-obsessed with K&D's thick and spacey remix of First Of The Month-- if you haven't heard it lately, here it is.

I remember digging through my Dad's old blues records a few months after I bought my first turntables in 98, asking him what was good and what wasn't. The first one he handed me was an extraordinarily warped and well-loved copy of Oscar Brown Jr.'s Sin And Soul. I remember listening to the album in my bedroom, hearing the bouncy shrieking sounds through a haze of nasty old-record-static, and wondering how many times Dad had stayed up late doing the same thing with the same piece of vinyl.

This record is a freakin classic, hands down. Crazy and smooth and fun and horrifying and deep-- hillarious and catchy-as-hell songs about slave auctions and chain gangs and death and love and kids at the zoo. I bought the repress from Dusty Groove a few months later, and it's been one of only a few vinyls I've taken with me wherever I've moved.

Here's a track: "But I Was Cool"

A few years ago, I finally saw him in person-- he was singing "Bullshit", a song he wrote about the Iraq war, to a Not In Our Name rally at NYU. And then, last week, he passed away at 78.

The obituaries in the mainstream media have done a good whitewashing job on the man's life, with a self-congratulatory good-thing-America-has-moved-past-all-that-injustice-nonsense-from-the-60s attitude that makes me ill. To read NYT or WaPo, you'd believe OBJ did nothing post-1969 besides sitcom cameos. Zero mention that almost all of his performances in the final ten years of his life were at rallies protesting the War On Terror.

Here he is in 2002 on Democracy Radio:

Certainly, terror terrifies me, I don't want to be anyone's damn collateral damage, I don't care what the cause. But on the other hand, I want them to fight all the terror. Not just this perceived terror that scares Bush and his oil interests, but the terror that terrifies the neighbors in my neighborhood in Chicago Illinois, where the police will jump on you and the gangs have been organized to terrorize the communities.

So yeah! Let's have a war on all the terror, and let's have that be an intelligent war that the considers consequences! There are consequences of all these things we're about to do! And when you say 'either you're with us or against us'... that's too simplistic. And so somebody needs to speak up.

The squares are running it. And what we need is hip people. And by hip I mean Human Improvement Potential, that sees that the human race could get better, and not try to beat it down into submission.

Human Improvement Potential. Oscar Brown Junior, Rest In Peace.

Bonus track: "Brother Where Are You"-- OBJ remixed by fellow musicopoliticist, Matt Herbert